NASA 2009 Mission Focusing on Extraterrestrials
“We really believe that in the next 20 years or so, we are going to learn a great deal more about life beyond Earth and very likely we will have detected life and perhaps even intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy,” said American astrophysicist Dr Frank Drake, who founded the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project in 1961.
According to India’s leading online newspaper, Rediff, the world’s leading astronomers are claiming that we may contact intelligent extraterrestrial life forms within 20 years from now. New discoveries are occurring continuously of Earth-like planets that are located outside our own solar system, prompting the launch of a major NASA 2009 mission that will bring this extraterrestrial contact into an actual reality. Over 200 billion stars have been found to be located in our galaxy, with half of them having orbiting planets around them. This makes 100 billion planetary systems with five planets in each system. “That is 500 billion planets out there — and bear in mind there are 100 billion other galaxies,” said Shostak. “To think this (the earth) is the only place where anything interesting is happening, you have got to be really audacious to take that point of view,” he added.
The 2009 mission will involved the Kepler space telescope, continuously scanning the same 100,000 stars for a four-year mission in order to discover Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around suns. Simultaneously, SETI will be focusing its deep-space listening equipment on the newly discovered solar systems.
The Kepler Mission is one of NASA’s latest developments, a program that searches for extrasolar planets while also being the second type of space-based instrument that has been constructed solely for this one task, with the COROT being the first one. Considered a space photometer, four years is required to detect periodical transits of one star by observing its planets with several goals in mind:
** Determine how many terrestrial and larger planets there are in or near
the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars
** Determine the range of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets
** Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems
** Determine the range of orbit size, brightness, size,
mass and density of short-period giant planets
** Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques
** Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems
This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
